Thursday, June 10, 2010

Statements From Whitman and Brown Campaigns

The campaign of Meg Whitman has issued the following statement in response to the comments made by Jerry Brown, quoted in my blog posting "Run Jerry Run."

"Just last week, Governor Brown promised he wasn't going to engage in mudslinging, but now he is comparing Meg Whitman to Hitler's Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels. Jerry Brown's statements comparing our campaign to a propagator of the Holocaust is deeply offensive and entirely unacceptable."

--Meg Whitman 2010 Campaign Manager Jillian Hasner

Jerry Brown's campaign spokesman, Sterling Clifford, confirms to the Associated Press that the conversation took place, describing it as "a discussion after a chance meeting while they were exercising. I wouldn't vouch for the accuracy of it, but I also don't want to dispute the accuracy of it. It was jogging talk taken out of context." He says Brown was not comparing the Whitman campaign to Nazis.

UPDATE: Friday afternoon, Jerry Brown issued the following statement: "I regret making the comments. They were taken out of context."

Watched this fruitcake being interviewed the other day and he is still a D- bag. And he keeps getting elected! Just think if he gets elected and Linda can lift her lard rear end off the couch long enough it can be like the good old days. Boone's Farm, good weed, wild sex, good tunes no cares what so ever, that's the Gov's office, the rest of the state can be given to mexico - oops too late.

Jerry Brown's campaign spokesman, Sterling Clifford, confirms to the Associated Press that the conversation took place, describing it as "a discussion after a chance meeting while they were exercising. I wouldn't vouch for the accuracy of it, but I also don't want to dispute the accuracy of it. It was jogging talk taken out of context." He says Brown was not comparing the Whitman campaign to Nazis. The original post is below.

Typical ploy-personal attack instead of debating the facts. Why anyone would want Gerry Brown back in office in CA is beyond me. Maybe someone should ask him why CA went from the top of the education ranks to the bottom during his watch...

If there is ever a fascist takeover in America, it will come not in the form of storm troopers kicking down doors but with lawyers and social workers saying. "I'm from the government and I'm here to help."

— Jonah Goldberg (Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning)

One of the overriding points of Liberal Fascism is that all of the totalitarian "isms" of the left commit the fallacy of the category error. They all want the state to be something it cannot be. They passionately believe the government can love you, that the state can be your God or your church or your tribe or your parent or your village or all of these things at once. Conservatives occasionally make this mistake, libertarians never do, liberals almost always do.

~ Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning

I observe the socialists of the Democratic party are quick to label their opponents as racists and Nazis. It is hypocritical, that they worship Woodrow Wilson, a president who segregated schools, and whose propaganda skills were admired and copied by Goebbels as the model they should aspire to. Read Goebbel's diaries if you don't believe me.

I remember meeting Jerry Brown's father and actually had lunch with he and my boss and several other girls from the office. We were the decoration on the cake. That was when he was running for Governor of Calif. in 1956 approx. Knowing my boss and Jerry Brown's connections I would never vote for his son. Give me a hard working girl to get the job done and straighten out Calif.

Sorry for all of you who don't like what Jerry said, but lest you forget we are still Iraq for the same Big Lie reason - tell it long enough and people will believe it. Whitman crushed Poizner with her so-little-truth-they-really-were-lies ad blitz(kreig) that the label is perfectly appropriate. Give me Brown any day. I'd rather know what he really thinks, even if it isn't worded in perfect PC fashion. We've already seen what we'll get from Whitman - smoke in the form of b.s. ads, mirrors (no voting record at all) and smut (in the content of her anti-Poizner ads). Looks like money CAN buy at least a run for office, eh Meg?

Even if she wins what can she do? Arnold was supposed to be the big savior until he ran up against the radical legislature and now he looks like a do nothing. We need Jerry now more than ever to purge all the phony conservatives from the California government. Let these commies screw it up even more and the backlash will clean them out later...

Goebbels was a genius--an evil genius to be sure, but still a genius. His techniques are constantly used today by politicians of all stripes, although they don't acknowledge it. If you don't understand what Goebbels was doing, there is a lot about 21st century political campaigns that you won't be able to understand either. Whitman owns the airwaves, and has used that to control people's perceptions in very much the same way that Goebbels did.

This kind of bogus-sound-byte manufactured outrage has badly crippled our political discourse. You really should be able to draw historical parallels to someone in Nazi Germany without being accused of making holocaust references.

Breaking in to the political commentary...I appreciated Doug's discussion (this morning on KCBS) of how carefully he approached the wisdom and ethics of posting these comments before doing so. Such thoughtful commentary can be hard to find, especially in an election year.

I realize that as a journalist, Doug probably figures this kind of scrutiny is a given, but it seems circumspection is not as valued or demonstrated as it once was.

Too bad that his thoughtfulness didn't make it clear that Brown didn't call Whitman a Nazi, or provide the context of Goebbel's being most famous for the "Big Lie" theory of propaganda, or tell us when this encounter took place, how he had such specific quotes when he neither recorded it nor took notes, or how this went unremarked upon (no surprise, since there's generally no activity on this blog) until the Meg Whitman campaign blasted it out ...

> Peggie Hamilton said...Breaking in to the political commentary...I appreciated Doug's discussion (this morning on KCBS) of how carefully he approached the wisdom and ethics of posting these comments before doing so. Such thoughtful commentary can be hard to find, especially in an election year.

Wow, William, whoever you are, why are you such a Doug-hater? I never saw the word "Nazi" in that entire blog post. He never says Brown called her a Nazi - so why do you say he didn't make that clear? Brown himself says "he invented this kind of propaganda" - so why does Doug have to reiterate it? How do you know he didn't take notes? And I am one of his regular readers - there are HUNDREDS of us - and I know he has won awards for this blog. So i think it's got plenty of activity! None of us remarked upon it because it was just another typically smart, funny, interesting blog from Doug. Whitman called attention to it to hurt Jerry - otherwise none of this controversy would ever have happened.

And P.S. to William: do you really, really think that If Doug had added in parentheses (Goebbels most famous for his Big Lie school of propaganda, etc...) that Whitman would have said, Oh, it's ok then, he's provided the proper context, I won't get offended or tell anyone about this? Get real.

I thought you were pointing out facts. Seems to me you're just making your own decisions about what's "highly unlikely" and what isn't. I just looked back at the blog archive, which I guess you didn't bother to do. He blogged monthly in 2007, 2009 and 2010, and weekly in 2008, during the presidential election. That seems like a pretty consistent pattern to me. This isn't an everyday "blog." It's more like a column, on the side of what he says on the radio. They post his radio stories on it every day, and then he writes the extra column every month. That's hardly "virtually nothing". Do you not see all the audio, the links, etc? But never mind, you can just choose to believe your own reality, like all those right wingers you like making fun of.

Wow...people, people! Play nice! I'm sorry I haven't been here to monitor all of this; I was down in Anaheim for the AP awards. I'm about to post a followup blog to answer some of the questions and concerns that have been raised. I know some of you are impossible to satisfy, but I will do my best. The frequent assertion that I am some sort of conservative plant Whitman supporter is making the people who actually know me laugh really, really hard. So is the suggestion that there's something "suspicious" about what I wrote, or its timing. William, did I really only blog ten times in the last 14 months? I didn't realize I had neglected the blog that severely. Thank you for counting. By the way, I do microblog, on Twitter, five to ten times a day, sometimes more, so the tweets have really taken a lot of the oomph that used to go into the blog. And yes, hard as it may be to believe, it is true - we have won quite a few awards for the blog, both regionally and nationally. A couple were for political reporting, and the others were for Best Radio Website, with a selection of my blog posts part of our entry. Maybe we won in spite of those, not because of them, although that's not what the judges' comments said. Anyway, thank again everyone for all the comments, and I look forward to your reaction to the blog post I am just about to send out!

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About Doug

Doug began his career as a copy boy at the New York Times & then moved to California to play in a rock band. After hundreds of gigs and one Indie album failed to make him a rock star, Doug returned to journalism, working for AP Radio & San Francisco station K-101. He did a brief stint at KGO before joining KCBS in 1990. Doug covers politics for KCBS, and also does special features and investigations. He has won more than 200 broadcast journalism awards, including a duPont-Columbia Special Citation, 10 National Headliner Awards, five national Edward R. Murrow Awards & a record eight awards from the national Society of Professional Journalists - more than any other reporter, in any medium. Doug was also the first three-time winner of the AP's Reporter of the Year Award for California/Nevada & has won it four times overall.
Doug was born in New York City, raised in Manhattan and Wisconsin, and has a degree in History from Brown University. He lives in Oakland with his wife, Dr. Sara Newmann. And yes, he still plays music! He is the bass player for the Eyewitness Blues Band, made up of broadcasters from KCBS and CBS-5 TV.